A few years ago Jessie and I were given an original iBook (300mhz G3) by my mom, who no longer needed it and rarely every used it. At the time it was already very dated and didn’t really have much use other than word processing. It had only 96mb of RAM, no wireless card, was running OS 8.6, and the battery was basically dead. I immediately updated it to OS 9.2.1, but didnt’ have a copy of OS X to install and with only 96mb of RAM it would have run poorly anyways. For a long while, we really didn’t use it for very much other than dragging a long ethernet cable over and hooking it up to the internet.

Recently, however, I have breathed new life in to the system. The first big upgrade it got was a AirPort card. The style used in this notebook is discontinued and kind of hard to find, but I ended up finding one relatively inexpensively, so I installed it. So now it had wireless internet access, but the battery was still dead, it was still running only OS 9.2.1 and the lack of RAM was killing me. Next step: Find more RAM. This thing takes PC66 memory, which is honestly a huge pain in the ass to find. Even just finding PC100 that will downclock to PC66 was tough, but I somehow found a VERY inexpensive stick of 256mb PC133 on eBay that would downclock all the way to PC66 and was compatable with the computer. The difference between having 96mb of RAM and having it now maxed out at 288mb is huge. I know it’s slow no matter what, but this made a big difference.

The iBook was now ready to handle a copy of OS X. Unfortunately, the newest version, “Tiger”, requires a FireWire port and a DVD player, neither of which my iBook has, so I had to settle with the next best thing, “Panther”, or OS X 10.3. I got everything installed last night and just now finished installing all of the newest updates to bring it to 10.3.9 as well as a whole slew of software updates. Suprisingly for its age, its running great! Its obviously not performing like a new iBook would, but its running OS X much smoother than I thought it would and the wireless access is working great, which is not something I could say for OS 9.2.1. The only thing left that it needs is to get the battery working, but I’m not sure if that’s the battery itself or the charging board, as it actually doesn’t see a battery right now. That, however, is a problem for a different day.